


Why God Made Steel-Toed Boots

by what_alchemy



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-23 23:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2560148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's been waiting a long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Steve was drawing on Brighton Beach when he saw a fella get down on one knee before his girl. He presented her with a little box, and she covered her face with her hands, but by the grin that split the lucky lunk’s face, she must have been saying _yes, yes, of course, yes!_

It was too cold out for there to be much of a crowd, just some folks walking barefoot in the sand, but they all whooped and hollered when the fella stood up and spun his girl around in celebration. 

Steve packed up his pencils and followed his feet back home.

—

Steve kept his mother’s wedding ring in a little pill box in his sock drawer. His father’s, too. She’d plucked it from his inert hand when the army had sent her his remains, and she’d worn it on a chain around her neck until she went to join him.

They were a matching pair of his & hers rings in a soft, inexpensive gold, littered with dings and dents. His mother’s band boasted a little sapphire that Steve would get cleaned up and polished when he had some money to spare. If there had been inscriptions, they had long since rubbed away. 

Sometimes he took them out and stuck them on his index finger, where he could rub at them with the pad of his thumb. His dad’s was loose, spinning restlessly over his third knuckle, but his mother’s always got stuck halfway down.

—

Steve was so caught up in the rhythmic worrying of the rings on his finger and the strokes of his pencil that he didn’t hear Bucky come home, and he startled when Bucky laid a smacker right in his hair.

“Jeez, Buck, you want me to have a coronary?”

Steve twisted around to scowl up at him, but he knew it was a losing battle when he saw that Bucky’s most maddening smirk had taken up residence in the corner of his mouth, and his hands were heavy on the back of Steve’s chair. 

“Hmm, no,” Bucky said, “got plans’n all.” He leaned all his weight into the chair so Steve was half tipped over. He bent down and slotted his mouth against Steve’s, who couldn’t help but sigh into the contact. The angle was odd, but they kissed a long time anyway, retracing familiar topographies rendered foreign until Steve got lightheaded and forced his chair back down. Bucky rubbed at the achy space between his shoulder blades where he was, at twenty-five, already growing stooped. “Hey,” Bucky murmured. “You all right, pal?”

“Tip top,” Steve said, only a little breathless.

“Sorry,” Bucky said. “You just looked so good there, with the light like that and how you chew your lip when you’re thinkin’ too hard, I couldn’t help myself.” He was pressed up against the back of Steve’s chair, carding his fingers through Steve’s hair. Steve let his head fall back against Bucky’s stomach. 

“I don’t think too hard,” Steve said, “you just don’t think hard enough.” His eyes fell shut as he savored the light scratch of Bucky’s nails on his scalp. 

Bucky snorted, and then his left hand swept down Steve’s left arm until Bucky’s big hand cradled his, and he fiddled at the rings on Steve’s finger. 

“Quit tryna snow me, Stevie,” he said. “You forget I know you too good.”

Steve stood up and nudged the chair out of the way so he could put his arms around Bucky and stick his nose where it fit just right under his ear. He smelled like sweat and a day at the docks, but also himself, that deep, fresh smell that meant Steve was home. He squeezed him tight, and Bucky’s arms around him felt like safe harbor. 

Steve toyed with the rings, and Bucky stepped out of his embrace.

“So I got us a couple’a dates for Friday,” he said, and Steve’s heart sank. Bucky dragged a hand through his hair and sighed, tilting his head. “Don’t look like that,” he said. “They’re like us. Won’t it be nice, going out somewhere respectable?”

“We can’t afford it,” Steve said. He rubbed at his nose and turned back to his drawing. Two hands, entangled, one bigger than the other. Wearing wedding rings. 

“Steve…” Bucky pressed himself against Steve’s back and set his nose at the juncture of his neck and shoulder. His hands were warm on Steve’s hips. “Don’t be sore.”

“I’m just tired of it, Buck,” Steve said. “Don’t you get tired? I just wanna be with you.”

“And you will be. You are.”

“It’s not the same, some dame on my arm when it should be you. You make a liar outta me with these phony dates, Buck.”

A puff of air across his neck brought goosebumps up all over Steve’s skin. Bucky extracted himself and moved his heat and hard lines away from the cold, damaged little twist of Steve’s, and Steve hated it. 

“I gotta shower,” Bucky muttered, half-turned away from him, but Steve darted a hand out and caught his wrist. Courage seized him, swelled in his chest like a living, beating thing, and he sank to his knees. Bucky’s brow furrowed, that lush mouth turned down. “Steve—”

“Marry me,” Steve said in a rush of breath. “Here and now.”

“Stevie, get up, don’t do this.”

“We don’t need anyone else’s say so, Buck. You and me forever, right? To love and cherish in sickness and in health? What’s that but a marriage?”

Bucky’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and his mouth parted to make way for his quickened breath. He knelt down in front of Steve, eyebrows still drawn together.

“It won’t be real, out of the sight of God,” Bucky said. 

“I know you don’t believe that,” Steve said. 

“It’s not a matter of what _I_ believe,” Bucky said. He took both of Steve’s hands in his and pressed them to his face. Steve took them away to cup Bucky’s cheeks and leaned their foreheads together.

“Bucky,” Steve whispered. “Marry me.”

“God, Steve.”

“Say yes.”

“You’re certifiable, you know that?”

“Bucky.”

“Yes. _Yes_ , you little shit, I’ll marry you every goddamn day the rest of our lives.” Bucky’s voice broke, but Steve was too busy smiling so hard his eyes leaked to call him on it, and they clung to each other like a pair of limpets.

Eventually they let go, and Steve slid his father’s ring onto Bucky’s finger. Bucky huffed a single laugh and ran his thumb over Steve’s cheekbone.

“Sucker,” he said. “You’ll never be rid of me now.”


	2. Chapter 2

For a formerly weaponized spy assassin, Bucky was not particularly good at stealth. He’d been back for fourteen months, three weeks, two days and nine hours, not that Steve was counting, and right now he was on Steve’s couch ostensibly watching the Humphrey Bogart marathon, but really just staring at Steve over the jumbo bucket of popcorn down to its dregs between them.

“I was born when she kissed me,” Bogie said on the big screen. “I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me. You like it?” 

Gloria Grahame and her dead eyes didn’t seem too impressed, but she opened up her rosebud mouth to talk to him about it anyway. Not that Steve heard what she said.

“So did you change your mind?” Bucky said. His words were sparing these days, always with a touch of gravel about the edges, as if each syllable were hard-won. Steve turned his head to meet his eyes. Bucky didn’t blink.

“Did I change my mind about what?” Steve said. 

“Being married to me,” Bucky said, and simple as that, all the air was sucked from the room and Steve felt time contract and render him a 90-pound asthmatic with a vise around his lungs. He forced himself to haul in a deep breath. 

“I didn’t know if you remembered that,” he said. Bucky’s brow furrowed and he tilted his head, the ghost of a smile touching just the corners of his mouth.

“Seems a funny thing to forget, Rogers,” Bucky said. “Being as we were bumpin’ uglies about ten years before I took my little trip off that train, and my memory’s not _complete_ Swiss cheese.”

Steve reached over to poke the remote, and the TV went dark. He shifted enough in the couch to face Bucky fully, shoulder rolled inward.

“Well, I didn’t wanna pressure you,” he said. “Things have changed. We’re both different. I couldn’t know if we still wanted the same things. If _you_ wanted those things.”

“Could have asked, genius,” Bucky said. The side of his mouth was tilted up as if Steve were the most quaint and amusing thing on the planet, and the exposure of one canine zinged Steve right in the base of his spine. It was a familiar feeling he’d learned to clamp down on in the past year. 

“Talking’s never been what we’re good at,” Steve said, and he caught the flick of Bucky’s gaze to his lips. His heart picked up speed. 

“So let me lay it out for you,” Bucky said, moving the popcorn away to slide into its place. “I’m still ass over teakettle for this kid from Brooklyn, I think you know him. Wonder if he feels the same way?”

Steve couldn’t help it: he closed his eyes and shuddered, but Bucky was there, propping him up, as warm and steady as ever.

“Yes,” Steve whispered. “Always, yes.”

Bucky reached up with his right hand and brushed the hair from Steve’s forehead. 

“Wanna get hitched?” he asked. “For real real this time.”

“You hang out with Tony too much.”

“Just answer the question, punk.”

“It was real last time,” Steve said, linking their fingers. “It’s always been real.”

“Yeah, but this time we can actually wear our rings,” Bucky said. “We can hold hands on the street. We can get tax breaks. We don’t have to hide.”

“You sayin’ you’ll never take me on a fake double date again?”

“Mmm, and share you? Nah.”

“Dancing?”

“Only if mine are the toes you’ll be trampling on the dance floor,” Bucky said. 

“That a promise, jerk?”

Bucky raised his right hand and settled his left over Steve’s heart. 

“That’s why God made steel-toed boots, pal.”

A watery laugh bubbled up out of Steve’s throat, and he kissed his husband for the first time in seventy years. 

**End**

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little palate cleanser for all the angst I've been writing.


End file.
